In-Place Upgrade NetWare to Open Enterprise Server

Currently, Novell doesn’t support an in-place upgrade from NetWare to OES. This has prevented some customers from upgrading to OES.
To address this shortcoming, Novell Consulting is investigating a procedure that allows customers to perform an in-place upgrade when certain prerequisites are met and address the following needs.

Be running a supported platform before the end of Extended Support for NetWare 6.5

Avoid transferring data from old to new hardware

Avoid the long downtime that is required for a migration

Avoid purchasing new hardware for migration

The attached document presents a technical overview of a type of in-place upgrade. The solution presented in this document allows customers to

Use the existing server when it meets the prerequisites, simply replacing the OS.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at SUSE Conversations, this content is definitely not supported by SUSE (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up). It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.

This sounds nice on paper, but it is dangerous. My philosophy has always been to have a way to return to the old server if something goes wrong. If you have a separate piece of hardware, and the installation fails, you can go home and try it again another day. If you are doing an in-place upgrade, and the installation fails, you have an all night frantic panic session restoring the OS, and restoring the data from backup. Money tight? Buy a used piece of hardware, and do a migration. Contented users and piece of mind is very important.

You are assuming that everyone still uses their local disks for storage. I boot from a Compellent SAN so I can make a replay before I try the in place upgrade and if it goes bad then I just roll back to my replay and reboot the server. Do a search for Davenport Group, my Compellent Business partner, and they will explain it to you or put you in contact with me.

The outlined method was tested with SLES 10 SP4 (together with OES 2 SP3).
BUT – SLES 10 SP3 is not supported with Studio 1.2 anymore so you can not build that image in Studio – but if you build your own image it might work with some customization.